Grant McWilliams

I've installed the Superblogger plugin for my site and things look promising but there are issues. This is a general plea for patience from you my faithful viewers.

Over the course of the next week I will as I get time be tweaking the operations of the blogging plugin. I've noticed that formatting on articles has gone screwy which I'll fix later today (I hope). Also as an experiment comments will be handled by Disqus (pronounced discuss).

As I work through functional bugs I'm able to file them away on the site migration. Up until yesterday RSS feeds had stopped working. This had to do with some very aggressive caching I was doing. This has been fixed by turning the caching off.

What's still broken/sucks.

1. Photo gallery theme still so ugly it's mother doesn't even appreciate it
2. Disqus comments broken. Not sure if it's a bug in SP comments (it's sending a relative URL to Disqus) or a site misconfiguration
3. Old Disqus comments are not mapped to the new URLs. I have the URL map in csv and now just need to write a script that dumps the new URLs from mysql, greps for the article name and rewrites the URL. This will then be uploaded to Disqus. Sort of moot since they don't work anyway.
4. I need an old URL to new URL map for mod_rewrite so all links out there pointing to the old URLs still work
5. My visitor counter either doesn't seem to be reporting the same statistics as the old one or Google is severely punishing me (perhaps the latter) for changing all the URLs it had cached. If it's the latter it will go away at some point.
6. My visitor counter and who's online module don't agree. There will be 50 people online but the visitor counter says there's only been 8 people all day. How is that possible?
7. Lots of CSS work still to be done. I'd like to have an automatic white space border around photos plus a nice charcoal gray line. Also the right hand column of links will probably be moved back to the left but I need to write the CSS for that. I'd also like to move the search bar down to the menu bar, re-enable breadcrumbs and work on the surrounding whitespace which I don't like. I'm also going to change the main body text from 12 points to 13 as soon as I figure out who's overriding whom in the CSS.
8. Recipebook is completely offline. I'm building a new one with SobiPro. This also means I'll need to purchase some modules to get the same functionality that I had before. 
9. Restaurant Reviews are also offline for the reason stated in number 7.
10. No file download manager to manage all downloadable scripts, templates etc..

There's been a long drought of articles here at The Man, The Myth, The Legend and for that I apologize. The only thing I can say is life has gotten more complex and very busy. I started a new relationship and the school quarter is ending thus most of my time/energy/motivation has gone into those things. As I find balance I should be able to get back to posting more often.

A note to my readers though, looks like we'll push past 2 MILLION unique visitors this month. It took 4 years to get the first million and only since September to get the second. This is a huge milestone and I hope the increased traffic continues. I'd like to see more commenting of course though.

Another announcement is that I'll be pushing the Recession Chef articles out to a new website - recessionchef.com. Don't get too excited yet as I'm still working on it but you can wander over there and tell me what you think if you'd like. I'll still post general food blog posts here and I'll repost Recession Chef articles here (or at least promote them) but all articles having to do with "Eating well on a recession budget" will be posted there. That content will go toward the book. If you'd like to follow the Recession Chef on Google+ (where all the cool kids hang out -  Oh my gosh, Facebook is sooo MySpace!) you can circle the Recession Chef Google+ page.

Last August I decided to get serious about SEO/SEF and getting rid of bottlenecks in my site. A fast site gets indexed and just now in January am I getting the site close to what I want it to do. The gallery's are still a mess and I have some other issues I need to deal with (disqus comments still don't attach to the old articles) but I'm working on them. The Disqus problem will get taken care of in the coming weeks. The Galleries I'm not sure what I'll do about. I'd really like to move away from embedded Gallery2 but haven't found a Joomla gallery that was anything more than a lightbox showing photos in a folder. I really don't think that will work for 6000 photos. 

Anyway here's the results of the work I've been putting into this. Let it be known that it took four years to get to my first million hits. Now I'm doing 200k - 250k per month.